Charles Kenny

Books, Papers and Articles

Category: O. Environment

  • A speech at the Oxford Martin School. The world’s richest nations have made considerable global financing promises to developing countries—including a $300 billion annual pledge for climate. But in the last few months aid budgets have been slashed across Europe and in the United States, even as financing is diverted from development and adaptation to…

  • A CGD note. An increasing proportion of official development assistance (ODA) is being dedicated to climate, and climate mitigation in particular. Even were that spending highly effective, and despite reaching about $30 billion in 2020, it is not large enough to finance investment that would significantly slow global climate change. But were it effective, 20 years of…

  • A CGD note. Marginal abatement cost curves, which suggest the cheapest approaches to reducing carbon emissions, are out of favor in international climate finance discussions because they are not good tools to use when thinking about systemic and urgent change. On the other hand, internationalfinancing studies based on adding up the investment requirements linked to…

  • Technology and trade can ensure water scarcity is not a constraint on progress. In PERC Reports.

  • A CGD note. The long run global estimates of climate impact on GDP are small. That hides the fact that there are big volatility shocks and impacts are concentrated in poorer countries.  And that matters a lot for policy response. 

  • Your World, Better: Global Progress and What You Can Do About It is a book written for the smart and engaged middle school student.  It looks at how America and the World has changed since the reader's parents and grandparents were young: what has happened to health and wealth, homes, school and work, rights and…

  • A CGD note with Ian Mitchell and Atousa Tahmasebi. As ministers and officials meet in the coming year, they will make new financing commitments on climate and promise to ensure all of their activities are “Paris-compatible”—against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Any new commitments on climate finance will need to balance existing development challenges…

  • A CGD note with Scott Morris. Rather than use aid to finance climate mitigation projects (it's the wrong instrument, mis-targeted and inadequate in scale), why not fund a World Bank and IFC capital increase: its cheaper, better targeted, more appropriate to the task, ensures common but differentiated financing, and gives the World Bank Group something…

  • A CGD Working Paper on policy coordination to help meet the SDGs.  TLDR: Important, but hard.   This paper discusses the role for policy integration to speed progress towards delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is required because the goals set very ambitious targets for progress across a range of interlinked areas, encompassing both synergies…

  • A working paper for CGD with Mallika Snyder.  The Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set of targets for global development progress by 2030 that were agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Amongst the 169 targets are a number that call for universal access, universal coverage, or universal eradication. These include ending extreme poverty and…